3 Community-Based Products Doing It Right with April MacLean

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0:11and you my name is Greg Eisenberg welcome to the show thank you so happy this is a fun one because we work together yes you are the head of community at Lake checkout yes and 70 of the time we agree upon community-based product stuff and 30 of the time we violently disagree violently yes like in our nice way respectfully I disagree yeah exactly I wanted to bring you on the show because you're a Fountain of Knowledge when it comes to All Things community and community-based products give us a quick background on on who who April is I have been building community in some capacity for a couple of decades although the

1:03language formal formally wasn't there I think until recently but um I was a community builder for um Sony Music I've done work with Lululemon of course um and most recently before joining the team at late checkout I was running the community at Trends which was a newsletter started by the hustle which was acquired by HubSpot cool I love it Sam par and the and the game yeah exactly salmon amazing yeah so the reason I wanted to bring you on was you're you always gotta you know your your finger on the pulse when it comes to what's happening in the community-based products world and I asked you hey bring

1:49five of the most interesting community-based products yeah and let's just talk about it and if we find it interesting probably some other people might so that's that's why you're here okay yeah I mean I brought five but I ended up actually just kind of getting excited about three in particular because I felt like they hit all a couple of subsets of what community could look like so I'm excited to nerd out on them and disagree violently all right let's let's start what's what's your first one um so I got really into learning about this community I'm going to butcher this name and then people are going to get so

2:27mad but it's called lomography l-o-m-o limography and the so the okay you have to get into the history of limography first of all it's a product Community but you would never know it when you first stumble in you would you would you wouldn't even understand that that's what you just fell into because it looks like this community of Artisans very user generated content based but lamography is really based on a specific type of Photography where the camera dictates the quality versus the subject and so okay 1982 this is how it started there was this General I'm in a butcher his name General Igor petrovitz korninsky he was the right-hand man to the usss

3:18ours minister of defense and he brought in this like little compact Japanese camera and handed it over and they were very impressed by it and decided that they were going to improve it and then move it into mass production so it started with just this like one product that they thought was sharp and then a decade later so 92 this entire Society is built around it and it becomes a global Society so it's interesting about them today is that when you go to their website it's pretty Lo-Fi it's not the fanciest thing you've ever seen But if you go to slash forward slash photos it's all user

3:55generated content so it's all of this like really rich artistic stuff to look at they have events and exhibitions and they have a merch shop but Underneath It All they're selling products they're selling cameras and lenses and gear to this very specific Niche subset Community I'm just kind of enthralled with the whole thing yeah I think they they off they also have some really interesting competitions right yeah yeah exactly um and it looks like MO all of their out in marketing is just content generated from the people that are using this style of Photography and product so they have essentially kind of replaced this idea of a funnel with a community

4:41yeah and I think that's you know that's one of the benefits of building a community-based product so we should probably Define what that what that means so what we're talking about is either the community itself is the product or the community enhances the product so here's a great example of like the community is enhancing the product yeah it's interesting too because in some ways it feels it felt to me initially like the community was the product because they did such a good job of highlighting the community as the first layer I actually had to dig a little bit before I understood how are they monetizing this how is this even

5:20working before I got to the product but if you are someone who's into this style of photography you don't have to dig like you find that you have found your thing it's like the the juiciest kind of nerdiest subset of Photography I've seen in a long time yeah and it's it's not small so I think you know I'm just looking on their website they've got 16 million photos that have been uploaded yeah I I dropped their your URL into ahrefs and they have they have about 200 000 organic visitors a month which is not like the biggest thing in the world but it's it's very much enough to make a

5:57very good business off of this community and and host of products yeah I'm you know I'm guessing they haven't raised a lot of money I'm looking right now so they've actually raised a million dollars um so it's one of those business not a lot it's not a lot I mean it's not a lot um I think what's also interesting here is like the big players are probably not going to go into this space that's exactly right yeah this is definitely to niche of a subset I think for them to worry about that style of competition uh I also feel in terms of their raise it's such a legacy product

6:39at this point I mean I wish I could say that 1982 was fairly recent since I was born around that time but it's actually it's it's quite it's been quite a while since this has been going and it had such a stronghold in its Origins we're in Vienna um and it just made its way globally to where I think they said they were in I don't know 42 countries right now their Community yep yeah it reminds me of a post I I posted uh two days ago on Instagram about being a nerd so I said the way to Financial Freedom is being a nerd and I Define nerd as a nerd is you

7:19can't talk about 99 of the things you care about with 99 of the population the guide to nerd-based companies number one be the biggest nerd you could be number two attract other nerds like you number three and this is what they're doing build products for nerds and number four have fun I cannot believe I missed this I usually see the things you post but this is like that it's that first part like you there's when I get together with my contemporary dancer friends our conversation is so boring and repetitive and probably um nauseating to people outside of our world but there's nothing better than to talk shop with other nerds it's like

8:08where you feel you're at your best shiniest self yeah I think uh I wrote a post also about sort of this fast foodification of everything and how products are all becoming the same and all look the same and and it's not even just products it's cities and it's you know you walk into downtown Toronto and you might feel like you're in downtown Sydney um and you know when I go to just this website lamography yes it looks basic but it's white and the photos like that's a white background and the photos are just like popping out and I think it's just it's about the photos and I think that really speaks to that

8:52audience and um what might look really ugly quote unquote to us let's say might look beautiful to them I had this experience yesterday I I was meeting with this woman who um again to reference stands I'm in the dance world it's a big part of my life she owns this kid's dance studio and I was thinking about her website as I was driving over there I'm thinking in general about how dance studio websites to me are really awful they're like it's like clip art logos and a lot of pink and some sparkly gifts and and I've always been a little bit judgey I think on that front but as I was talking to

9:31her and thinking through her clientele there is this whole subset of people mothers who put their kids in dance mostly that that is the signal to them that they have found what they're looking for and it's I think from a design perspective it's easy to get caught up in like sleek and cool and what looks good and all of these things but there's all of these signals that aren't created for you so I I've noticed as I make my way through the world looking at all of these Design Elements and feeling maybe like that one kind of missed the Mark I always come back to this thing like but for a specific kind

10:04of person that's probably exactly the signal that they needed to know was for them yeah and I think from a web design Trend perspective where you're going to start seeing more in 2023 and 24 is custom fonts that you know that white that Y2K aesthetic of like really big eye-popping design like less of that like clean-cut sterile you know Millennial colors um you're you're gonna see this trend towards uh website design that feels very custom and and feels very not afraid to use colors and stuff like that and I think that's uh the reason why that's happening is because of of web design for Niche communities and

10:52creating experiences that really really connect with them I agree I also think Apple kind of gave way to this like this cookie cutter approach to like you know the clean sans-serif some of really minimalist um and we were so hungry for it and you always see the pendulum swing when it comes to design but it just kind of leached everything of Personality over time and I've been excited to see I'm back to late checkout recoletta was one of the first things I fell in love with I'm like oh God it's such a breath of fresh air yeah okay so that's number one [Music] um what's number two

11:35I'm on this because I just feel like it's a very it's a micro version of what these things could look like if you think about lamography limography there was a product first and then they built a community around their product and usually when you have communities around a product they're serving one of three four specific purposes so they're for acquisition your community exists to bring you more customers um internally at least um there are four retention your community exists because you're trying to hold on to maybe a subscriber base longer um the third is therefore success or support so they're helping each other use the product better which also is

12:16retention but also reduces like support calls and then the last is they give you user generated content that you're using to do something so you have all these like sort of North stars of these various communities so with labography they have a product they built a community around it with this other one they started with a community and the woman who was running the community I don't think ever had any intention of building an audience but I think she she applied this kind of classic Community Based product framework that we like to talk about um and it happened during the pandemic so in 2020 when the world shut down

12:51March 16th I think it was this woman Barbara and she was not an entrepreneur in the least started this Facebook group called view from my window and the idea was she was looking out her window one day and realized I can't remember where she lived it was I want to say Germany but I could be wrong realized this is going to be it for me for a while like what I'm seeing outside my window right now is what I'm gonna see for the foreseeable future because we're on lockdown and how many other people are having this same feeling and what would it be like if I could see the view from

13:25their window as well so at least we had a little bit of reprieve from staring at the same four walls so she started this Facebook group she called it View from my window and when I tell you that it went viral or caught on like I can't even over emphasize the popularity and how hungry people were see other things at that time I joined the community really quickly I submitted my photo this is in March 2020. my photo did not get approved and posted until November of 2020 because that's what her backlog looked like it's like people couldn't get their pictures in there fast enough so I'll pause there

14:03and see if you have thoughts on that so I'm just going through the the group there's three there's almost 3.6 million members and it's still growing it grew 6 000 members just this week alone it's it's it's huge um what do you think about Facebook groups as like [Laughter] the answer to this but I'm curious what do you think about you know trends for example is a community that lives on Facebook yeah um this is a thriving community that lives on Facebook The Narrative is really that like Facebook is dead you know is there room to build your community on Facebook yeah yeah that's a very dangerous

14:47narrative Facebook is nowhere near dead but is dead for a specific Ally much like anything else the first question is who are you building for and whatever I'm thinking about Community platforms you and I have had this discussion so many times about like where is the community platform we've had it like three times today yeah exactly that's exactly right um there's there just isn't one there's never been a de facto but two I wonder if there ever will be because the thing is you and I like to be in different places than my 20 year old daughter than my you know 70 something year old my

15:25mother's not somebody something but for certain subset of people who are still on Facebook it works the question is always what's more important in the long run user experience or traction and I think for a lot of people traction is more important so they would rather sacrifice like Facebook has a lot of drawbacks to its its groups a lot and they would rather sacrifice those features if they can get quick traction then try to get people to build a whole new habit and I think compelling people to return to a platform every day that they don't already have baked into their daily lifestyle is like that's the stuff of

16:03separating the wheat from the chaff for sure yeah I mean full disclosure like we launched a a community on Mighty which is a great Community platform we launch it for uh you probably need a robot which is an AI Community a free community anyone could join um and we we realized it wasn't the right platform for that community and we realized that hey we have to consider potentially moving off because you know maybe if we want Bots to exist they need a you know we need to go to some place like discorder or slack that you already have these AI Bots like you know mid-journey Bots that you know

16:51people could see these images and it just flows right in there so um and also like we took a poll on our private Twitter and people were just like we want Discord or slack so it just goes to show you that um you know there's room for all sorts of Cuisines you know you might you might like Italian but I might like Japanese and Thai and now I'm just getting hungry yeah but I think I think you're right I think when it comes to community platforms there's there's room for a food court and that's what it that it's it's really more like a food court than just like a

17:36single restaurant yeah um and Facebook does play a really really important role in that food court I agree there's also just tons of people who wouldn't consider themselves Community designers by any means who have launched really successful Facebook groups and just kind of learned through trial by fire and I don't think they would be able to learn those lessons if they had launched anywhere else what don't you like about Facebook groups I think the first the first difficulty is that you don't own the data so when people join your Facebook group you don't get to own their email address it's just very it's very rented attention and while there's workarounds

18:18um I don't they're very manual or they could probably disappear in the blink of an eye if Facebook just flips one little switch there's no native way to own your your list the second part of it is the data that they give you the metrics are really poor quality and they're not a helpful look at the really how well your community is doing whether it's thriving there's no way to organize topic channels um I I think those are the three things that I find the most bothersome and there's no good solid onboarding feature I mean the way that you bring people into the fold is so indicative of the

18:59experience that you're likely to have in that community and Facebook doesn't really give you a way to thoughtfully do that I remember talking to you about data and Community platforms and why it's so important and one of the ways is one of the reasons why data is so important when when it comes to building Community is you want the ability to bring people back and if you don't have a single source of data like you can't say like oh hey uh these you know 2 000 people haven't made a post in 30 days or 60 days what can we do to bring them back you just can't do that on Facebook no

19:38you can't there's there's very limited way to reach out to those people at all another thing that to know to understand about Facebook is that your group showing up in other people's feed so when I log in and I'm scrolling which I don't do I I will say look here's a free tip to all of our friends out there you can install a chrome plugin called Facebook news feed Eradicator and you'll never have to see anything again I haven't seen a Facebook feed in years but um for those who do scroll their feed and you see things come up from groups that you're in that's wholly dependent

20:12on Facebook's algorithm and there's nothing that you can really do to affect that to any great degree and baked into your metrics is included so when they say like active users they're also talking about people who scroll to pass your group as they were scrolling on your feed that's not an active user that's not someone who actively came to your group and participated so there's so many um false data points baked into their metric system which is exactly right um View From My Window though back to Barbara and her story like I said it took off like hotcakes you have all and what was so what's extraordinary about

20:53it is that as you're scrolling you see someone's like a gorgeous view from Paris they're on a Parisian balcony and then a minute later it's like some Appalachian View and then you're in it's just an alley just a concrete alley and a puddle and some sewer and you really are getting the sense that you're seeing the world through the lens of it's It's a total exonder-like experience um so as this thing got more popular she did the classic like listening to what people say to consider how you might be able to productize off of this and uh ended up creating this coffee table book that lived forever by the same name of

21:35you from my window it featured all of these her favorite photos from the group and she was careful not to select just the highest end photos but like a real trip through humanity and people were so honored to be included in the book but she also there was a backlash to it I mean there's a kind of an important lesson there that we should talk about for a second this poor woman got a whole lot of flack for creating this product because people were in the community saying like oh is this what this is for or you didn't tell us you were going to be using our photos or hey

22:07if you're profiting off of this shouldn't we all get a piece of the pie granted it was probably the minority but the minority are always the loudest um but there is a a little lesson in there around how you manage expectations inside of a community because once you break trust with the community your members start to feel Bamboozled it's very difficult to ever dial that back and that's probably maybe the one differentiator between somebody who has like a real Community experience behind them and someone who's just kind of wingy as they go along is understanding how to manage the expectations of your members so if you were running that Community

22:45what would you have done differently

22:52she led it from what I can see she posted one day hey we're going to turn this into a book here's my and never expected the backlash just thought it was going to be this really well received um announcement and I think what I would have done is long ago started seating conversations about like what are the ways that we can memorialize what we've produced here what are the ways that we can because what happens is community members start coming up with the ideas themselves and when they think it's their idea or when they contributed that that idea there's much more like kind of ownership and

23:29Grace in terms of they're so excited to see that you're creating this thing that they have an idea over I think if I was going to do something like that I probably would have started many conversations along the way like leading down that path first also being open to maybe a book won't be the thing maybe as the community speaks to me there will be other things that emerge that I can respond to so it's not really about manipulating them towards your answer but that's how I would have looked at it like deep transparency and why do you think um why do you think View From My Window

24:01works or worked you know like let's break that down because I think it's going to be helpful for a lot of people listening who are trying to create their own version of this in whatever space they're in how do you create a viral sensation okay Greg well if one of us is a viral expert and certainly not me so that seems like a setup but um a while back I heard Seth Godin talk about this restaurant this Thai restaurant um I think it's in Queens I'm not positive but this it's like this tiny tiny little hole in the wall place and this restaurant was um not in any Michelin guide it wasn't

24:46Popular by any means but there was a small Niche Community called chow hounds that caught wind of this Thai restaurant and something happens when chow hounds start talking about a restaurant which is usually you know if it's a it's a popular restaurant I go there and we don't go to hole in the walls but all of a sudden if it's being mentioned we're gonna go there it got mentioned in uh oh my gosh some very common publication I wish I remembered what and the place went gangbusters so this Thai food restaurant has done um an incredible amount of Revenue it's extremely popular uh profitable there's it's very hard to get a seat inside of

25:29it it just it took off because it somehow appeals to this Niche that of people and somebody once asked Seth like do you think that the owner knew what she was doing because the way that she conducted that her business really kind of played into the desires and wants of this subset of people like she didn't explain certain things on the menu they don't offer any Pad Thai which is like every American's tie go to and Seth used this term that I would use now to to talk about Barbara the woman who started View From My Window which is that she had naive wisdom I think part of the reason that this

26:05worked wasn't anything that was highly strategic or well thought out but I think she had the naive wisdom to understand that this pandemic just hit everybody is feeling a sense of isolation that they could not have conjured up in their Wildest Dreams their wildest terrible dreams I suppose um and she gave people the opportunity to feel like they were United at a time where they couldn't have been more isolated from each other so one I just think she got kind of Lucky and she knew to capitalize on this this turn of this flexion point I guess in society and then two what if we think of what what's Community it's this

26:44many-to-many relationships so when people would post pictures she would encourage you to say hello from wherever in the world you are so here's my view out my window in Austin Texas and then people are like I'm sending love from you know wherever it was Tuscany um hello from with their picture of Minnesota and it was so bizarre to just feel like you had all of this connection to people and places that you would never think of I think that that is so addicting and I think human loneliness is a as its own kind of epidemic and pandemic as it were and she just happened to blend those two things

27:22really really well the slogan from View From My Window summarizes everything perfectly it's It's just sometimes sorry it's the slogan is it's just someone's little corner of our world our world our world is the key phrase the big thing that she hit upon was during a time when everyone felt siled in their own rooms couldn't go and hang out with loved ones couldn't go to their places of work yeah she created a space for people to experience what it means to be a human being which is a very social experience and that's why it took off and and that's why it took off during covid but

28:13it actually has a lot of legs today uh still because I think you know to your point like people still suffer from loneliness um and there's an incredible set of products to be built on top of uh her platform that can bring people together yeah that's exactly right pausing on this for a second one of the things that I feel so fortunate about is that I am a in community and that I'm working with a team like us like our team that really does look at life through Community First lens and the reason that feels so lucky to me is we happen to find something that is good

28:58for Humanity that reduces human loneliness and that happens to be a brilliant business strategy and there's not many things I think that blend those two things so well so the fact that like Community can mean just incredible ideas and profitability but that Community is also always means human good um is a really fortunate little coincidence there and I believe that they were inspired by view for my window because I actually think this came later but there's this other website called window swap window.swap.com it's actually my favorite website in the world um and in Windows swap you tune in to these I'm using air quotes here to these

29:40live feeds outside of people's windows and you can linger there as long as you'd like and it'll tell you in the corner where in the world you are so it'll tell you you're in Germany or you're in Manila or you're in Jakarta wherever you are and it's all of these volunteers globally who agreed to set a little camera looking out their window so that you can like drop into their home at any time of day and sometimes if you watch long enough you'll catch glimpses of their life like I'll see in the reflection of the window that they're cooking behind and I'll and I'll hear the pan and the sizzle and there's

30:17something so emotional about that that you're in space with someone who's alone in there and what you wish you can say like you're not alone I'm hanging out with you like I love this view of yours you can't but there's something just so powerful about connecting people that way it also brings us back to what really got me excited about the internet in the mid 90s when I grew up on it which is it was weird it's a weird place great and it was a weird public place there were places that you can go to that were public that you could have some sort of shared communal experience

30:55what's really cool about both of uh both of those products window Swap and and View From My Window is that uh it does feel like a pot like a part of the fabric of the Internet it's public space that you can go to that you could experience something what it means to be human what it means to uh nerd out and and and just experience something versus you know the the traditional feed-based uh experience that um a lot of us you know experience for 99 of our internet you know 99 of people's internet experience today is consumed via feeds so I think what's really cool about window swap is they created like a

31:43custom app custom experience that you can experience um it's Unique it's got a good name uh Greg and his name I mean it's got a good name it's got a good name because like both that both actually have what wonderful names um you know because both of them really tell the story of of what exactly it does you know A View From My Window and I think going back to what you were saying around uh you know community-based businesses and and why they're why they often outperform I guess is the word of mouth on these community-based businesses are just so high meaning like I just heard about these two products

32:28and I just want to tell everyone about these products now right um and the same thing is true with the Thai restaurant that you mentioned which by the way was outside Queens I think the story is it was outside Queens um and the fact that they don't have a pad thai is such a core feature of the experience because everyone expects the number one thing to be on the menu to be a pad thai and a great Community experience a great community-based experience speaks to the the minority not the majority that's exactly right it's just the right signal and it's to drive this point home even

33:11more the window swap site yeah I feel like I'm doing somebody a favor when I share that site with them like I'm gifting them I'm going to give you this gift of the site that's just gonna like develop more empathy and love and and how often do we feel that way when talking about products like that's when you know you've hit something magical when you feel like you're gifting Somebody by being an ambassador not just like you know here's my Instagram post of this protein powder that someone's paying me to talk about totally different all right what's your number three product Okay so community-based Pro we did product then

33:54community community then product this one is um more like Community is the product but it's phys it's a physical space thing not a virtual thing so it is common house I'm sure you're not surprised that I'm bringing that up because I've brought it up many times in the past but Greg I'm so damn enamored with this I don't even know what to do with myself it's like seeing people build the world that I want to live in and I'm so desperate to know how their business is doing if anybody from common house listens to this can you just send me a message I I deeply need to know

34:26where you're at so common house uh the first one that they built they have like a flagship space um I believe the first one was in Charlottesville um yeah that was their downtown Charlottesville there's a couple of guys who were really interested in how old Society used to knit Community together so if you think about bridge clubs and supper clubs and all of those things where I said bridge clubs people used to come together for purposes pretty regularly and they had all kind of started to dissolve so these two guys decided to create physical spaces they bought they bought this huge gorgeous historic building in Charlottesville

35:08um and now they have one in both Chattanooga and Richmond and they just turned it into like a common house it's a space that people come together and these spaces it's kind of like a hotel in that there's all these amenities there's a co-working space there's bars there's um what are those drawing rooms is that the waste of Home drawing rooms or libraries it's just this third space every one of them has cocktails and and and every one of them is gorgeously designed so design was like a central element and they're just trying to recreate this idea that there could be this space where you can belong you have

35:47to pay a membership fee and that you can form connections to all these people in a physical space again and it's just for me it symbolizes all of there's a lot of things about history that I would rather not bring back or Amplified again but there's a lot of things about history that I think were really really beautiful or had beautiful bones and this resurrects those bones and I I so want to know that they're succeeding and doing really well but I have no data it reminds me of uh I think they were called salons right yeah exactly like during the Renaissance time is that correct yeah I think yeah

36:28I mean neither you or I are history but the idea was there was you know I think it was after the Renaissance or during the Renaissance uh these essentially like groups of people who would connect around in different coffee shops and areas and they call them salons and it was just you know writers and Poets and artists and um they would go together and discuss ideas for long periods of time and this what you're what you're kind of talking about common house feels a lot like a modern day salon um yes but how do you like how does common house not become Soho has okay will you say more about that

37:19uh yeah so I live in Miami and you know I was just at our house and it it actually felt the opposite of community like people were kind of just in their own world um they yeah they it didn't feel it didn't feel very cohesive in terms of the community that was there and it felt like there was a particular type of person that they let in I'm not a so-host member I was a guest of someone I see um so like how do you how do you how do you not make it like how do you make it exclusive not exclusionary

38:13please tell me that communities are exclusively inclusive yeah because I've been thinking that ever since and I hope I haven't been getting it wrong um that is such a good question and actually one of the first things I thought about when I did come across common house especially because of the way it looks like it's just very beautiful um and I think that kind of elevated curated kind of Gastropub Vibe um tends to appeal to certain subsets of people and not others um and I I do love the question about how do we keep this from being a Soho house because I think the absolute key to this

38:53is how relationships are being fostered inside of those spaces so I'm not never been to a Soho house I've never been to common house but as from a community design perspective some of the things I think about are how often you're allowing members into the physical space to just do their own thing to co-work to eat to drink to whatever and how often you're actually providing any sort of programming or direction or opportunity for them to be making connections with each other I think there's this element of Community Builders not wanting to ask too much of their members I've seen this a lot where people like they don't want a program

39:31too heavy they don't want to be too um restrictive about things but I think that we have a lot more freedom to create the world that we want to see in our community than we think and we um we let a lot of that power go so if I were putting myself in the first in the shoes of the common house guys there would be just specific requirements about how people participate in the programming in order to be a member uh because the if you want to go work and get out your laptop and bury your head or if you want to hang out with your best friend go to Starbucks go to

40:04the cocktail bar down the street if this is a social club is uh our responsibility to Foster relationship before anything else otherwise this probably isn't the space for you I think that's how I would approach that did you notice what kind of hat I'm wearing it's a hotel it's it's yellow and very cheerful so I just got back from an incredible vacation oh yes probably the best vacation I've I've ever gone on is that right I think so okay it was at a hotel called Palm Heights in Grand Cayman and I'm wearing a yellow hat right now I haven't taken it off since I've been there

40:50because I'm just so I had such a good time and so proud that I like I'm a part of their Community girl if you're watching this on YouTube you can see here's a Palm Heights uh coaster he's all in he's our Palm Heights notebook not the notepad I'm not gonna I you know I've got more but let's just stop there okay and and it really does feel like a community-based experience and I'll explain why actually I texted David Spinks as soon as I got there basically and I was like you know who's a community was and I was like you've got to go stay at this place so

41:28I first of all it's kind of like the White Lotus I'm setting the scene okay I'm setting the scene picture you know Cayman Islands white sandy beach 50 you know maybe like 50 rooms there very small you know everyone kind of knows everyone at the at the space like all the hotel guests oh this is there someone new from Finland who who staying with us you know like everyone knows everyone sat down for dinner waitress is like hey what do you get you know I was with my girlfriend what do you what do you what are you guys doing uh after this and we're like I don't know going to sleep

42:07she goes oh there's a secret bar just for hotel guests and like I checked Google Maps it's not on there I've never heard of it like not on their website and walk in there there's like there's like me and a few other people and there's like people doing interpretive dance and I was like this is the weirdest kind of experience in my life and that kind of like and then and you know the that sort of programming and those sort of like if you know you know type experiences is what drives a lot of these community-based experiences and for me I had never gotten that out

42:45of a hotel you know usually yeah uh when I go to a hotel even if it's a nice hotel it's a five-star hotel it's just it's lug you know five-star hotel's luxury but it's not a human you know community-based experience I was meeting people every day there's programming there's five or six or seven or eight things you can do and I think more and more people are gonna are gonna seek experiences like this and they're willing to pay extra for it people have ever been as hungry for Community as they are right now and I also don't think it's ever been easier to keep yourself out of community

43:26as it is right now so it is a really interesting conundrum because what you're what you're talking about is this idea well there's there's a couple of tendrils to pull on here you said if you know you know and so how do you get to after I'm so delighted by the fact that you're wearing this hat now that I know the story that it's just like you're so proud and happy Oh yeah I'm like proud dad moment Vibes you know I have no like they didn't pay me to go there I didn't get a discount like I just had a really good experience yeah and met some really interesting people

44:05and and and and just felt felt like I was a part of something bigger than myself well and think about what you texted Sphinx when you got there told me about it nothing good with us you don't feel like you're evangelizing a brand right like that's the power of a community-based experience like people can't wait to tell other people and I think a lot of businesses um I'm sorry to use such harsh language but I think a lot of businesses delude themselves into thinking that they're creating a business or experience that people are just can't wait to talk about but very few are at least not in this

44:45capacity um I'm reminded of there's this book called you're invited um that I really enjoyed reading a while back written by this this gentleman named John Levy and I think John lived in New York and he used to host these Community dinners and the way it works is he wouldn't he would personally invite a small subset of people 10 to 15 maybe and the rules were you weren't allowed to tell people your name and you weren't allowed to tell people your occupation and that the group as a whole cooked to the dinner together prepped and cooked ate the dinner cleaned up the dinner together and it wasn't until you sat

45:25down to eat your meal that you could finally talk about your name and what you did and he would have like Pulitzer Prize winners and just these incredible High Caliber people but it was a Level Playing Field while they were cooking that meal because no one could say use their uh work or career as an identity so it was such a purely communal experience it wasn't based on what people could get out of each other um and the fact that they had to clean together and prep together and do all this work they would come out with it was it's almost like taking what would six months to a year of forming a

46:00friendship Drip by drip and just compressing it all into a three-hour event and I think that kind of stuff can be so so incredibly powerful that communal based experience people couldn't wait to invite more people they always had more people they wanted to add to the list and they had to keep restricting and keep restricting so there's something this this evangelism thing is the key I think to these experiences yeah and I think you know you and I April because we spent so much time building digital products it's easy for us to forget that you know we can draw a lot of inspiration in the physical world and

46:37bring those experiences and nuances to digital products oh yeah yeah that is a really solid point in fact I think about that I think late check out things about Metal aim all of our things after physical spaces yeah we're pretty into it okay so those are your three community-based products on your mind are you not going to give us one bonus one oh why would you just drop the what I like to keep you on your toes the pressure that was awful um okay one bonus one but it has to be one that's like not one of the Blockbuster oh everybody knows that type of thing right

47:21that's kind of like the rule around it yeah yeah what's uh what what's something that almost made the list but didn't make the list um I would say that I would give a shout out to uh Nest Labs which was going to be on the list um I have been in that community so it's one that I was also a part of um Steph Smith actually put me on to that one and Nest Labs is a community of people who I don't know it's like this this like interesting and fun blend of um mindfulness and Neuroscience and um it's really around like productivity but I think the the thing that is so

48:05beautiful about it is it's science and strategy based it's not just like we're gonna manifest our best lives and take bubble baths and think good thoughts um but she's really done a beautiful job of unleashing that Community because she gave kind of just the right parameters around what community should look like and and all of these best practices and set the tone and the community just ran with it there's like if you were to last time I'm not in it anymore but you would click the event calendar and there was just endless events on deck that people were self-organizing without any sort of additional resources or support because

48:41they were so interested in talking about these practices and being a true community of practice um I think communities of practice have a really really special place in my heart because there's something about uh learning and practicing a skill set as a group versus just like you know feed and comment and chat and blah blah but when we're actually putting these things to practice together that makes a community incredibly sticky so that Shameless plug I get to do a Shameless plug right now uh we're about ready to launch a late checkout land which is our our community that is really based around bringing Founders and leaders and creators and Builders

49:28together who are really interested in this intersect of product and community and how these things can just create this highly kind of sticky space for people to hang out and learn things and one of the things I think about the most when I'm thinking about this community is how do we turn this into a community of practice on a real ongoing basis that it's not just hey here's more things to consume and read but it's like here's how we're going to get together and actually take steps towards mastering these skills and these Frameworks and like building the version of the world we want to see um last thing I'll say on this is Cody

50:04Sanchez had recently talked about like here's some questions that I like to ask myself every Sunday night it was this list of questions and one of them was what did I do this week to help build the world that I want to see uh and I think about that a lot like am I just doing busy work or what are the ways that I'm actually creating the world that I see in my head as the ideal and that's part of what I think about with late checkout land is like you're gonna build to get you're going to bring together really really high caliber people and that means that you can arm

50:34them and unleash them to make some incredible changes like how do you do that in a way that's more powerful than just consuming content how much does it cost to join late checkout I'm so glad you asked that question because late checkout land is absolutely free it's free but if you're joining and you're applying yep we we want you to we want you to be active and we want you to take it seriously it's more fun it's more fun for everyone when you know people there are you know want to collaborate on ideas want to share Frameworks want to want to be a member and and be active so

51:16um I think that's our only ask it's our and it also is a really good Community design principle in general is most communities need to have a gate as if Community is just like a business and that if it's for everybody it's just for absolutely nobody um so I will say we're only letting in 100 people to start and we're curating that list like physically going through every single and just sort of choosing and part of that is because you just those first members really set the tone and the culture for the way that people treat each other and the way they show up and the way they engage and so we're

51:52going to be really picky about that but it'll be a great place to hang out where do people go if they want to sign up they can go to late checkout Studio community I don't go right now if you're on go right now do it if you're on a you know a website do it plus you'll get to be you'll be able to see our website which is an example of I think a non-sterile interesting uh yeah plus you get to hang out with Greg and I like Greg and I are actually going to be active in that Community which I think that's a huge win yeah yeah

52:33I think so we think so we think so okay cool well April I can't believe I get to work with you on a daily basis and have these conversations um it's cool that other people are gonna witness our combos because we would have this behind closed doors so it's cool that we're having it with everyone listening um if people want more April which you're crazy if you don't want more April where do people go and follow you um April mclean.com m-a-c-l-e-a-n but I'm on most social platforms under Ms McLean mice I I chose it years ago and it was like oh it's too late I've been at it too

53:19long so we're stuck here yeah it's okay it's kind of it's kind of amazing you have your Greg Eisenberg is your handle on everything like you won at that game I mean Greg Eisenberg is kind of like the uh view from my window or window swap naming is what it is for a person it's just like it's very it is what it is that's the best way to describe it yeah but Ms McLean has way more character I think it's like you should you should stick with that more people more people should have cool interesting handles I appreciate that I will stick with it and thank you

53:58come back uh come back to the show when when you want to share more uh cool community-based products heck yeah all right you're on thank you for having me all right thanks April bye everyone